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Rusiñol - Picasso
- Data: Open to the public from 28 May to 5 September 2010
- Curator: Eduard Vallès, Museu Picasso
- Organized by: Museu Picasso de Barcelona and the Consorci del Patrimoni de Sitges (Cau Ferrat)
- Picasso expert Pierre Daix has written that the Catalan artist Santiago Rusiñol exercised a crucial influence on the young Picasso. This exhibition aims to explore this claim in depth and establish the elements of influence and confluence between the two artists by way of a comparative reading, both biographical and iconographic.
- Organized jointly by the Museu Picasso and Cau Ferrat in Sitges, Rusiñol-Picasso will put on show for the first time the strong links between the two artists on the basis of the thesis developed by its curator, Eduard Vallès, in his recent book Picasso i Rusiñol. La cruïlla de la modernitat (Consorci del Patrimoni de Sitges, Barcelona 2008).
- The paths of the two artists crossed at a time when their respective careers were in transition: Picasso was emerging from the academic tutelage of his father and the art schools he had attended and Rusiñol, though a highly acclaimed artist, was no longer the paradigm of modernity he had once been.
- When Picasso first arrived in Barcelona Rusiñol was one of the city’s most renowned artists. It is worth noting that a number of the themes the young Picasso tackled had their origin in pioneering works by Rusiñol. Picasso even painted his own versions of some of Rusiñol’s pictures, an indication the works that made of how closely he followed the older man’s work.
- The great attraction that Picasso was to feel for the work of El Greco throughout his life first manifested itself precisely at the time when Rusiñol was championing him. Rusiñol was also one of the first collectors of Picasso’s work and thus one of the first to perceive their value. A number of these Rusiñol Picassos are in Cau Ferrat in Sitges, the private museum founded by Rusiñol which Picasso visited on several occasions, both as a young man and in his mature years. In fact, during the 1960s Picasso made some little-known illustrations based on Rusiñol’s most famous work, L’auca del Senyor Esteve; these are also part of this exhibition, and show that the connection between the two artists still endured long beyond Picasso’s Barcelona years.
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Picasso - Degas
- Data: Open to the public from 15 October 2010 to 16 January 2011
- Curators: Richard Kendall, curator of the Clark Art Institute (Massachusetts), and Elizabeth Cowling, Professor of Art History at the University of Edinburgh
- Organized by: The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Museum Picasso de Barcelona
- This exhibition will trace for the first time the links between two of the most important artists of modern times. The show explores Picasso’s life-long fascination with Edgar Degas and his work, and amply represents the media used by both artists: drawing, pastels, painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography.
- The outcome of extensive international research, this exceptional show brings together outstanding works on loan from some of the world’s most important institutions and collections, and promises to make a unique contribution to the reappraisal of Picasso’s work.
- Picasso-Degas casts a new light on the emergence of modernism in the twentieth century, as a new generation of artists assimilated, reinvented or turned away from the Impressionist art of their predecessors. By letting us see Degas through Picasso’s eyes it reveals significant aspects of the way the Spanish painter perceived the past and revisits Degas’s own radicalism. The exhibition will bring together between 120 and 130 pieces, including a large number of paintings and sculptures by the two artists, with the aim of offering adequately documented examples of Picasso responding directly to Degas, as well as bringing out more unexpected conceptual affinities between their works. The thematic sections cover Picasso’s early academic training, the young artist’s interest in Degas’s imagery of modern life, the two painters’ shared obsession with toilette scenes, Picasso’s experiments in three dimensions in comparison to Degas’s, Picasso’s fascination with the ballet and Picasso’s prolonged dialogue with the French artist in the graphic work of his last years.
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